Suda On Line
Search

[Leonides], king of [the] Lakedaimonians, Anaxandrides' son, the twentieth king from Heracles. This man was the leader of the Greeks who resisted [the Persians] at Thermopylai. And in this place, it is said, Heracles set aside his body and became a god.[1] And Leonidas, when it was reported that the sun becomes invisible when the Persians shoot their arrows, said 'Let us be of good courage, because we shall fight in the shade'.[2] And to the soldiers, as they were getting their breakfast, 'Eat your breakfast', he said, 'for you shall have your dinner in Hades'.[3] When the king [i.e. Xerxes] drew near, all the others were wary of the multitude [of his troops] and fled, but the Thebans deserted: the king captured and branded them, with the three hundred Spartiate soldiers.[4] An epitaph was written for Leonidas: 'o stranger, tell the Lakedaimonians that we lie here, obedient to their laws'.[5] This Leonidas, together with the three hundred, resisted Xerxes around Sphakteria (sic).[6] And having acquitted himself nobly he died, when he was surrounded because of treachery; because a certain Ephialtes showed the road through the openings[7] to the Persians.
"And the famous Macedonian or a Leonidas in resolve or a Kallimachos or a Kynaigeiros -- but it will be enough to adduce the [name] Roman -- as he overheard the words of the doctors, asked whether the Roman side had won".[8]

Leonidas (the appropriate Doric form) was Agiad king of Sparta between c.490 and 480 BCE, in which year he perished heroically in the defense of Thermopylai. See generally OCD(4) s.v. Leonidas(1); Poralla/Bradford, A Prosopography of Lacedaemonians s.v. Leonidas; and, for the primary narrative, Herodotus 7.198ff. (web address 1).
[1] Herodotus refers only elliptically to Heracles' death by burning and his apotheosis, at 7.198.4 (web address 1).
[2] Herodotus attributes this saying not to Leonidas but to the Spartan Dienekes (7.226: web address 2).
[3] Not in Herodotus, but see e.g. Plutarch, Moralia 225D; also in Cicero, Valerius Maximus, et al.
[4] As the text is punctuated, 'with the three hundred Spartiates' must be taken with the preceding phrase about the branding of the Thebans; however, this makes no sense. Perhaps the punctuation should be emended so that the next sentence reads 'With the three hundred Spartiates, an epitaph was written for Leonidas', though even this is syntactically awkward.
[5] This epitaph (Greek Anthology 7.249), by Simonides, was for the Spartiates and not for Leonidas alone; the wording given by Herodotus has ἀγγέλλειν for the Suda's unmetrical ἄγγελλε. See Herodotus 7.228 (web address 3), which also quotes an individual epitaph for the prophet Megistias but not for Leonidas.
[6] Apparently a garbled reference to the Athenian capture of Spartan forces on Sphakteria in 425 BCE, i.e. during the Peloponnesian War (see Thucydides 4.8-41: web address 4); Sphakteria played no part in the Persian War. Adler notes that in the present entry Hermann suggested a corruption of Θερμοπύλας φυλακτήριον , but the connection of Leonidas with Sphakteria also appears at sigma 1713, q.v. For a recent study of the problem see Paradiso, as cited there.
[7] So the transmitted text; however, ὀπῶν 'openings' should probably be emended (as in the editio princeps of the Suda) to ὀρῶν 'mountains'.
[8] Theophylact Simocatta, Histories 2.6.6, on the death of an anonymous (but heroic) soldier in Heraclius' army. The four names there, called up from the past, make only a loose chronological and contextual fit with each other: nos.2-4 are Persian-War heroes (for Kallimachos see kappa 226; for Kunaigeiros, kappa 2695), but 'the famous Macedonian' can hardly be other than Alexander the Great (alpha 1121).